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ABOUT NEW JERSEY

IN the dark of early night, as all the city traffic heads home, 15 men in hoods gather in Newark. They have come to pray, as they do on each one of Newark's uneasy nights, for the sick and the poor and the dead. They pray for one another. And in the soft shadows and sharp cold that envelops the old church, they pray for a city that once nearly lost its soul.

After the Mass is ended, the men leave through a side door of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church and immediately enter their monastery, Newark Abbey. In about an hour, most of them will sit down at long wooden tables under a large painting of the Last Supper and have their dinner. But one of them will not be there.

He, in the black-hooded robe of a Benedictine monk, walks past the tables, past the contemplative reading rooms and the silent community house. He opens one more door and leaves the monastery, stepping into harsh lights and the untamed screeching of teen-age boys.

"Felipe, que boca tiene," he says to one of the boys crammed on a bench. His Spanish may be rough but not so his intention, which is to provide Felipe with a gentle reminder that although it is nearly 6 o'clock, he is still in school.

The silence of Newark's nights is among the saddest aspects of the city, but on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, not far from the county courthouse or the big Scudders Homes housing project, there is almost always noise coming from St. Benedict's Preparatory School. And though he lives in a monastery, the Rev. Edwin Leahy, headmaster of the school for the last 20 years, knows that where there is noise, there is life.

"Hey, Steve, how you doing?" he says to a freshman just coming from wrestling practice. The freshman is is one of the 505 boys who are part of the great social and educational experiment the monks have undertaken in Newark.

For nearly all of its 125 years, St. Benedict's has been a strict, sturdy college preparatory school for the privileged sons of Newark. It took the offspring of judges, lawyers and millionaires and helped make them judges, lawyers and millionaires, which in educational terms is a pretty safe path to follow.

Father Edwin, as he is known, took over in 1972 -- the year the school went through a wrenching metamorphosis of crisis, closing, rethinking and reincarnation. Since then, the school has accepted the children of the projects, and of the poor neighborhoods and the dingy, leaning houses, and is helping turn them into judges, lawyers and, perhaps someday, millionaires.

Now, in fact, it is well-to-do students whose families have moved to the suburbs, far from Newark nights, who often are excluded because Father Edwin believes that they have lots of alternatives. Last year, when most private schools were out begging for students, St. Benedict's turned away more than 150 applicants, many of them simply because they lived in suburbs.

"Once we get very successful, we can't turn around and forget the people we built it on," said the monk, who at 47 still looks like a seminarian. "The number of kids from the suburbs who had to be turned down doesn't concern me as much as those from the city who couldn't get in."

By all counts, Father Edwin and the other monks have accomplished something extraordinary in Newark, their story closely parallel to the story of the city itself.

The watershed event in Newark's history was the 1967 riot, which took place in St. Benedict's neighborhood. Members of the National Guard slept in the school gym.

After the fires died, many say, the city did, too and as families fled Newark, they found good schools elsewhere to which to send their sons. By 1972 the situation had become untenable, even for the monks. A vote was taken, and about half the community decided to move to the Benedictine monastery in Morristown.

Father Edwin, who had only recently been ordained, decided to stay, along with about 18 others. Emotions ran high. Benedictines take a vow of stability, and moving is not something they often do. There was some resentment toward those who had left, and a great deal of confusion about what those who had stayed were going to do.

"We went out and found jobs," Father Edwin said. He worked at a drug rehabilitation program in Jersey City called Patrick House. One monk found a teaching job. The Rev. Philip Waters drove a truck.

They did what they could, but it wouldn't work. "There was no way to sustain the monastic life if we had to be out of the monastery all day," Father Edwin said.

It was clear that if they could not change what they did -- run a school -- then perhaps they could change the school. They made it smaller, recruited black and Hispanic students, loosened up their academic standards. "We're not going to shovel everyone into college education," Father Edwin told a reporter in 1973 just before the school reopened.

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To symbolize the new beginning, the monks decided to change the school's name, dropping the word preparatory and calling it simply St. Benedict's.

"Boy, was that a dumb mistake," said Father Edwin, wondering at his own sanity. "The African-American families who sent their sons here wanted to know why, if it had been good enough to use preparatory when the white boys were here, it wasn't good enough for them? And they were right."

Preparatory is back in the name, and rigor back in the academics, though in a different form. The school runs 11 months of the year. Freshmen start with a week of basic training, sleeping in the school and getting to know how St. Benedict's works. They end their first year with a hike along the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey, this for boys who may not have ever seen woods more dense than Branch Brook Park's.

"A lot of what we do here is a cross between Baden-Powell and St. Benedict," Father Edwin said. And it works.

In 1973, the buildings were old and tired, and the school was just barely able to hang on. With the help of one of the suburban millionaires, Robert Brennan, class of '62, and $10 million of his support, the school has grown into a superb educational complex, with an impressive athletic field, new classrooms, gym, pool and library.

"They could have built it cheaply, but they chose the best, and when the kids see that, when we the parents see that, we feel that they are really pulling us all up," said Gloria Montealegre-Smith, whose son, Camilo, is a junior from Linden who wants to go to Harvard and become a lawyer.

For Mrs. Montealegre-Smith, the last three years have been filled with sacrifice, from arranging transportation to and from Linden to paying the $2,650 a year in tuition that "makes a little hole" in her pocket.

She said she and Camilo had learned early that St. Benedict's runs by its own rules. A few months into Camilo's first year, the Rev. Matthew Wotelko called her at home one evening to complain that the boy's assignment pad was the wrong width.

"At first I said to to myself, 'My God, what a petty guy,' " Mrs. Montealegre-Smith said. "I thought about it a while, and then I realized that if I want my son to be someone responsible, then I've got to get him a pad exactly as they wanted it."

Father Matthew, who has been at the school since it reopened and is one of the rocks on which it is founded, is unapologetic. He said he used first-year religion to stress organizational and basic study skills, an understandable deviation when 40 percent of students are not Catholic. Use the pad or write a paragraph that begins "A freshman at St. Benedict's must always have and use his assignment pad," 5, 10 or 200 times.

The school makes up in determination what it lacks in size. More than 80 percent of its boys go on to college, including Harvard, Columbia and Cornell. Its soccer team produces world-class players, and the roster of intramural sports includes such unlikely activities as fencing and water polo.

"Every time I meet somebody new and they ask me what I'm doing, what sport I play, they usually either get surprised or they don't know what it is," said Sergio B. Pereira of Newark, the co-captain of the water polo team.

How does it all work? "I don't think it's all that complicated to explain why this school works," Father Edwin said. "It comes down to the amount of time adults spend with kids. People try to make it more complicated than it is. It's time that makes the difference for us."

Time. And maybe something else. Throughout the centuries, the Benedictines have lived by the words "Orare est Laborare. Laborare est Orare." To pray is to work. To work is to pray.

Even, it seems, in Newark.

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